Please Do Not Tap On the Glass

Once again, the U.S. government is gearing up to slaughter wild horses because they’re taking up land needed for cattle so we can slaughter even more animals. If the American public could get off their fat asses and stop eating factory-farmed fast food, perhaps then we could have some balance in our wild lands. I might have written about this atrocity in the past.

According to the NPR story I heard this morning, and you can read online, the Bureau of Land Management has completely mismanaged the program. Quelle surprise. The BLM has long been in the pockets of cattle ranchers and will do anything to keep them happy. Chris Heyde of the Animal Welfare Institute said: “The reason we’re in this position is simply because of horrendous management of the program by the Bureau of Land Management. We’ve been screaming about this for decades — that the system is broken and sadly in the last 10 years, it’s gotten even worse because of their proposal to do mass roundups.’

Heyde says the BLM has a built-in conflict of interest; the agency is the tool of cattlemen who graze cows on the same public land used by wild horses.”

The New York Times reports that “The federal Bureau of Land Management, the legal custodian of the wild horses and burros, recently proposed euthanization. For years, the bureau has been running the Adopt-A-Horse program, selling mustangs from the range to those who would care for them. But 30,000 once-wild horses were never adopted and are being boarded by the agency at facilities in Kansas and Oklahoma (another 33,000 run wild). As feed and gas grow more expensive, the rate of adoptions plummets.”

There are comments in both stories about conservationists who claim that too many wild mustangs destroy the environment for other species. I wonder if these conservationists are eating the slaughtered animals that the cattlemen and BLM are so eager to promote? If it weren’t for the ranches raising non-human animals for slaughter so that Americans can continue their obesity trend, would there be enough range land for wild horses and other species? If you’re a conservationist and you eat factory-farmed carcass, doesn’t that muddy your message?

Why aren’t these “conservationists” questioning the premise “that a mere 28,000 is the perfect number of wild horses on land that once supported 2 million — and that the cattle-grazers have a right to the land. Given the United Nations report on the devastating effect of the livestock industry on the environment, and given the devastating effect of high meat consumption on U.S. health, and also the effect of the round-ups on the mustangs — the classic symbol of the American West, that premise should be questioned,” Karen Dawn said.

If you haven’t taken action on the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, then it’s high time you did. If you haven’t been rethinking your diet and the suffering of 10 billion land animals every year for your damn Big Mac, then it’s past time that you did.

s.